


Honigbiene

by violetkareninas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, post episode 49, widojest if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 00:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17949734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetkareninas/pseuds/violetkareninas
Summary: "She is Jester, and he is - well -He is trying."--Post episode 49 feels. A one-shot from the P.O.V of that sad wizard man we all know and love.





	Honigbiene

**Author's Note:**

> Honigbiene - German for "honeybee".
> 
> A short, reflective one-shot on Caleb and his feelings about "**that** throwaway comment by Jester, during ep. 49 (goddamnit Laura Bailey and Liam O'Brien) 
> 
> Widojest if you squint, but I'm also all aboard the platonic love & Caleb/happiness train, tbh. 
> 
> Enjoy! May develop into a series of one-shots.

_“Are you secretly in love with me?”_

The question hits him harder than it has any right to. For a man whose mouth still tastes of vomit, whose hands are clammy and shaking, and whose heart is thrumming under his chest with a force he feels it might breaks his ribs, this question still manages to be the hardest hit of all. It is sucker punch to the gut that sends him momentarily reeling.

He looks at her, his expression pained, fingers anxiously tugging at the loose threads in his worn coat. He looks at how her lips quirk into a playful smile, how her head tilts, and the way the skin around the edges of her eyes crinkle in that oh-so-familiar way he’s grown so fond of over the time he’s known her.

She doesn’t know about him. Not everything, even now. And she can’t. He knew that if she did, he could lose one of the most precious things he has managed to find and cling onto as he slowly, ever so slowly, clambered into this rag-tag group from the wreckage heap of his previous life. A life that still clung to him, like the smell of dirt and sweat and vomit on his clothes as they ventured away from Felderwin.

He doesn’t forget what she means to him. And there’s a little part that hates himself for it.

In fact, forgetting anything she’s done to make him happy would be impossible. She is like the sun, a fixed constant, and for a moment, in that moment, she is blinding. Any words he could say, were he able, shrivel and die on his tongue like blackened ash and burning phosphorus.

She is Jester, and he is - well -

He is trying.

She is a girl who grew up without seeing the outside world, whilst he only wished that he hadn’t. Seeing the way she loves her mother makes him feel ashamed; a hot, burning, roiling nausea that sits in his chest that tastes and feels like guilt. But then he is so very used to pain.

Seeing Jester with her mother and the love shared between them, back in Nicodranas, as someone who, every day, misses his mother and father, knowing he can never go back, was enough to make his heart break.

It was then that he knew, as he watched them embrace - red upon blue - in one crystallising moment that seemed to stretch on and stay with him as they ventured across the ocean, that she would never look at him the same way again if she knew what he had done to his parents. She was a young woman who loved and missed her own mother with a pain he feels a thousand fold.

How could he ever tell her he knows a bit of how she feels? A man who’d killed his _own parents_?

But he cares. Despite everything, he cares. He is not a good man, not like the way she thinks he is, but despite any judgement he cannot help but be drawn to her and the image of how she sees him. There is a well of feeling, this thing, a mote of possibility that sits, aching in his chest. Her smile is a knife, but one that he would give anything to see, because when she smiles, for a man who remembers everything, he forgets just a little what it is like to be unhappy.

He has missed his family for so long. But maybe, with her and the rest of the Nein, he can start to imagine what it might be like to forge a new one.

_“Are you secretly in love with me?”_

That question.

How could he not? How could anyone not? But that is not the point, nor what she is asking. He knows, and does not reply. He is not ready to.

So instead, he gives her a look, one that conveys of a depth of unexplored feeling, an expression that speaks of exhaustion and pain. Of course he is. Not in love, no - not since Astrid, he tells himself he is not the kind for that, not anymore, not yet, but with her - this is something else entirely. A relationship, a something that speaks of closeness and concern and shared experience. He loves her, of course he does. She might be a good liar, but he is better. He does not answer. Not because he can’t, but because - how do you fit so much into so few words?

_Yes._


End file.
